If Bend Goodwill Can’t Sell It, It’s Still Recycled

Heading through the back doors at Bend’s Goodwill store, you go into a sorting area.

Plastic bins full of recent donations are packed with a variety of items, everything from clothes to books.

Some of it will end up in the store, for sale and helping to fund Goodwill?s mission to break down barriers to employment. But a lot of items are too torn or worn to make the cut.

That doesn?t mean the end of the road for the item, or for Goodwill.

Goodwill Regional Director Betsy Kurilo said that “88 percent of unsold or unsellable items, we’ll put back into the recycle stream.”

Clothes that can’t be sold are bundled. At the Bend store, three bundles a day at around 1,000 pounds per bale, head to the loading docks.

And Goodwill doesn?t mind a single shoe or a beat-up jacket, but recycling in such large quantities means money.

“Those items last year that were salvageable, textiles and cardboard — $269,000 of that were put back into our mission,” said Kuril.

Last year in Central Oregon alone, more than 1,300 tons were kept out of the landfill.

Clothing and other textiles are by far the No. 1 item that Goodwill recycles here in Central Oregon, totaling 946 tons. Second on the list is TVs, totaling just over 150 tons.